15 Far-Out Facts About Area 51

Area 51 Facts

Area 51. The name conjures an aura of secrecy, mystery, and of course, extraterrestrial happenings. Indeed, the military installation — located about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada — is the site of secretive military testing. So what do we really know about Area 51, myths and conspiracies aside? Here are 15 facts you can hang your hat on.

What's in a name?

Photo Credit: Dennis N. Grasso/USGS

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What's in a name?

Area 51 is just the sort of bureaucratic military jargon that sounds like the basis for a vast conspiracy. Where, after all, are Areas 1 through 50? In fact, the name comes from designations on Nevada Test Site maps from the 1950s. Area 51 is part of the Nevada Test Site (now known as the Nevada National Security Site), a remote area of desert 65 miles (105 kilometers) north of Las Vegas. It was the Nevada Test Site that hosted hundreds of nuclear weapons tests starting in the 1950s, almost 100 of which were above ground.

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Conspiracy Central

Photo Credit: Roswell Daily Record

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Conspiracy Central

Actual nuclear tests apparently aren't scary enough. Area 51's major claim to fame is as an alleged extraterrestrial technology research site. It all started in July 1947, when the Roswell Daily Record's front-page headline screamed "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region." The U.S. military claimed the unidentified crashing object was just a weather balloon; conspiracy theorists insisted it was an alien spacecraft which was then taken from the Roswell ranch property to Area 51 for reverse-engineering. And perhaps there was a large-eyed alien "gray" inside? In September 1994, the Air Force released a report with a fuller story: The wreckage was indeed a balloon, but not an ordinary weather balloon. Instead, it was an atomic monitoring balloon meant to detect far-off nuclear testing blasts.

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Delayed UFO Claims

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Delayed UFO Claims

Despite the headline-making balloon crash in 1947, Area 51 didn't really get its extraterrestrial reputation until the late 1980s, when a man named Robert Lazar told a Las Vegas television station that he worked at a mysterious site called S-4 near Area 51 to reverse-engineer crashed flying saucers. This caused quite a stir, but Lazar was later found to have fabricated his employment not only on the base, but his entire background: He claims to have graduated from MIT and Caltech but actually went to neither, and he also claims to have worked for Los Alamos National Laboratory, which also turned out to be false.

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No visitors

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Author Bio

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Contributor

Stephanie interned as a science writer at Stanford University Medical School, and also interned at ScienceNow magazine and The Santa Cruz Sentinel. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what her latest project is, you can follow Stephanie on Google+.